This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Google Changes Local Review Schema Guidelines
Continuing its emphasis on reviews, Google has updated its rules for how businesses can markup their reviews. There are several new, detailed rules, but the most notable of the bunch states that site owners can only markup “reviews that have been directly produced by your site, not reviews from third-party sites or syndicated reviews.” Source: Get Five Stars
Google to Add Account-Level Sitelinks
Google recently announced via Google+ the upcoming implementation of account-level sitelinks. This means that sitelinks will soon be available to show automatically with any ad in your account. Google stated that “Campaigns and ad groups that don’t have campaign or ad-group level sitelinks will automatically use sitelinks created at the account level.” They also gave no information as to when this addition will roll out for all advertisers. Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Google Launches Search Live Carousel
Select publishers have been given access to a feature that Google has begun testing called “search live coverage carousel.” This new feature gives publishers the ability to send content covering breaking stories in sports, elections, news and the like. And, in order to actually show up in this carousel, publishers are required to use marked up AMP HTML and push the content to Google using an Atom XML feed. Source: Search Engine Land
Google to Increase Review Threshold for Seller Ratings in Ads
Google will be reportedly increasing the review threshold for advertiser’s to include Seller Ratings in their ads. With this update, businesses will need to accumulate at least 150 reviews, up from 30, in the past 12 months. If a business doesn’t meet the new requirement, they may not be able to show seller ratings once the change takes place. In addition, this change will make it more difficult for small businesses to use seller ratings since they may not be able to accumulate enough reviews. Source: Search Engine Land
Google Allowing Searchers to Describe Features and Atmosphere of Businesses
Google has been testing a feature that allows searchers to tag a pre-selected set of attributes for businesses. For example, someone searching for a clothing store might be asked if the store offers men’s or women’s clothing, whether or not their visit to the store was quick, and whether or not the store offers good discounts. Source: The SEM Post
Additional Commentary
Feelings That Can Negatively Impact PPC Management
Author Bryan Gaynor found that, in his experience, feelings can get in the way of managing PPC campaigns. He found that trying to please everyone is one of those feelings, nothing that some people just don’t work well together. The author also notes that fearing change can have negative impacts and urges readers to embrace change, especially for this industry. Lastly Gaynor says that overthinking can lead to you making unnecessary changes and suggests you allow a PPC strategy time to take shape & collect data. You can then make the appropriate changes based on that data. Analysis: Bryan Gaynor, PPC Hero
We Enforced NAP Consistency at Scale Then This Happened
The effects of name, address, and phone (or NAP) consistency in citations has been a hotly debated topic in the SEO community for years, and in this post for Local SEO Guide, Dan Leibson lays out the details of the most comprehensive NAP consistency study ever. In this study, Local SEO Guide (partnering with Yext) “performed a round of duplicate suppression” on the citations of a 1.3k location business. By tracking rankings in the Local Pack, they were able to conclude that while accurate citations won’t necessarily give you a boost in rankings, they are the foundation of local SEO and thusly should not be ignored. Analysis: Dan Leibson, Local SEO Guide
